A Lump of Cruelty

Alabama law now makes it a crime for an illegal immigrant to solicit work and makes it legal to detain people indefinitely on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

The law allows police to detain people indefinitely if they are suspected of being in the country illegally and requires schools to check the status of new students when they enroll. Those elements make it perhaps the toughest law in nation.

The law targets employers by forbidding drivers from stopping along a road to hire temporary workers. It also bars businesses from taking tax deductions for wages paid to illegal workers and makes it a crime for an illegal immigrant to solicit work. A federal judge has temporarily blocked those sections of the law so she can study them more.

So any pretext of being concerned about folks coming here to be a burden on the system is completely abandoned. It is now extra illegal to even try to work and feed your family.

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Observing both the US and Australian debates over immigration, it is clear that anti-immigrant sentiment (which this law is pandering to) is a function of two factors:
(1) level of unemployment
(2) how much sense ordinary citizens have that migration is “under control”.

The solution to the first is for the Fed to fix by increasing aggregate spending. (Any supply side reforms, however worthy, are unlikely to be anywhere near as effective.) Or, to put it another way, do its job as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia has.

The second is bedevilled by the fact that one side of the debate “wins” if nothing effective is done about illegal immigration while ordinary citizens can only get a sense of having a say if legal policy (the one they get to vote on) matters. In Australia, there was a notable and dramatic drop in anti-immigration sentiment when the then Howard Government ostentatiously cracked down on boat arrivals. This despite the same Government running a high immigration policy and the least “Eurocentric” policy in our history.

Of course, Australia is also the world-champion at “cherry-picking” migrants–it is helpful to be a prosperous, English-speaking island-continent.

To be consistent, if you believe that “aggregate demand” is what controls the pace of an economy (and I personally don’t believe any such thing, but there’s a rumor going round that many people do), then you would have to believe that immigrants can displace locals out of jobs, and thus working to feed your family is implicitly putting someone else’s family into poverty.

I would have thought that was a perfectly valid conclusion of Keynesian theory.

The situation in Australia is kind of complex. If you check the following document:

The table on page 12 labelled “Figure 1″ shows that the highest humanitarian intake was in 2004-2005 (under the Howard government) and it dropped steeply during 2008 (under the Rudd government) then came back up again (under the Gillard government). Ask the average Australian in the street who was least generous to refugees out of Howard, Rudd and Gillard? Most of them will tell you Howard was an absolute bastard when it came to refugees, and Gillard and Rudd were pretty decent.

You can see that there was a burst of boat arrivals around 2000, and then another burst recently in 2010. We are facing the highest levels of boat people in a generation. That’s a much lower figure than total immigrants, and a much lower figure than even humanitarian immigrants, but nevertheless a relatively large number of people are coming here without any invitation, and often without any documentation at all. Also note that the highest humanitarian immigration during 2004-2005 happened at the time of the lowest number of boat people. That’s because we were taking people out of refugee camps under a well organised system, rather than pulling people off rocks and rescuing them from sinking ships under a disorganized system.

That’s the weirdest thing of all, you find people who swing from the apron strings of the Nanny State but absolutely can’t abide by the idea that government gets to control who comes to this country. It’s a strange old world out there.

On a final note, has anyone looked at the Liberty and Democracy Party’s policy for solving the problem of people smuggling?

Here’s another level of awesome to this story. After the Civil War and being forced to free their slaves, the South brought back slavery by renting convicts to plantation owners almost for free. Blacks were convicted and imprisoned for exceedingly long periods unjustified for their often trivial crimes, such as being vagrants, in order to continue their proud tradition of forcefully using human beings against their will.